SouthgateHow about ZINC?
Russell
Overmod SeeYou190 There are still quite a few paper mills in the Southern United States. . They are HUGE, and would need to be compressed massively for a layout. Makes me wonder, though ... what about a specialty papermaker? Like a smaller version of Crane -- notes, invitations, currency paper, pardon the expression 'cream laid stock' ... special car lettering for 'Rag Service'?
SeeYou190 There are still quite a few paper mills in the Southern United States. . They are HUGE, and would need to be compressed massively for a layout.
Makes me wonder, though ... what about a specialty papermaker? Like a smaller version of Crane -- notes, invitations, currency paper, pardon the expression 'cream laid stock' ... special car lettering for 'Rag Service'?
There's a pulp and paper mill on my layout. It is fairly well described in the narrative on my blog. The mill produces all types of paper from newsprint to kleenex to cambric linen stationery for the swells.
Usual deliveries of raw materials include gondola loads of hardwood tree stumps and giant bales of recycled corrugated medium (what civilians call cardboard). And every once in a while, a carload of old blue jeans arrives.
If it's paper, it's SJP&P.
LINK to SNSR Blog
Southgate How about ZINC? AKA white metal. It's on EVERYBODY'S layouts. If not locomotive boilers, frames, and other white metal detail parts, it's the weight in those locomotives and some freight cars, or even the floors. And many of our vehicles are white metal. Even if you use pennies for weight, yeah, they're zinc these days. For modelling, it could have to do with mining, transporting ore, processing, or transporting the finished product. Dan.
How about ZINC? AKA white metal. It's on EVERYBODY'S layouts. If not locomotive boilers, frames, and other white metal detail parts, it's the weight in those locomotives and some freight cars, or even the floors. And many of our vehicles are white metal. Even if you use pennies for weight, yeah, they're zinc these days.
For modelling, it could have to do with mining, transporting ore, processing, or transporting the finished product. Dan.
Speaking of zinc, one of my favorite industries to read up on is smelting. Lead smelting often has zinc production as a by-product. While steel production is pretty popular on model railroads, it seems copper smelting and/or lead/zinc smelting is not as commonly represented.
Save your Dixie cups. The South will rise again.
David Starr www.newsnorthwoods.blogspot.com
SeeYou190There are still quite a few paper mills in the Southern United States. . They are HUGE, and would need to be compressed massively for a layout.
jcopilot So there's 3 different types of cars for one industry. Not bad. It was a very large facility so not a good candidate for complete, accurate modeling, but a combination of building flats and 3D structures would get the point across. This is a great thread, always like reading about the industries that people model. Jeff
So there's 3 different types of cars for one industry. Not bad. It was a very large facility so not a good candidate for complete, accurate modeling, but a combination of building flats and 3D structures would get the point across.
This is a great thread, always like reading about the industries that people model.
Jeff
Michael
CEO- Mile-HI-RailroadPrototype: D&RGW Moffat Line 1989
There are still quite a few paper mills in the Southern United States.
.
They are HUGE, and would need to be compressed massively for a layout.
-Kevin
Living the dream.
Perhaps the most underrepresented industry on my RR is a paper cup company, I've only seen one on one other layout - someone who was modeling the Western Maryland line coming out of Baltimore.
In the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills there used to be the Maryland Cup Company. It received 100T covered hoppers with plastic pellets which were sucked out the car and into the building with hoses, the siding was alongside the building with no platform. Tankcars with wax were spotted on a different siding, I suspect they were double-hulled to allow steam to be pumped into the void in cold weather to liquefy the wax. The wax was pumped into large storage tanks. 50' boxcars were spotted inside a building, I can only guess at their use - inbound plastic bags and thin cardboard boxes for individual sale and cardboard cartons to hold several of the smaller boxes, also inks and dyes for the paper cups, paper for the cups. Outbound would be cartons of paper and plastic cups, plates, and cutlery in 50' boxcars.
MisterBeasleyNot an actual industry or even much of a structure, but a carfloat is more than just a scenic element.
It had literally not occurred to me before the trolleybus thread last week that there were now not one, but two effective systems for making working carfloats. You might have to put some kind of magnet keeper on one or more of the cars and gin up some sort of raisable magnet or solenoid arrangement to keep them from rolling 'in transit', but otherwise lots of fun staging cars down the apron and then retrieving them 'across the water' at a different part of the layout...
Not an actual industry or even much of a structure, but a carfloat is more than just a scenic element. It is a universal source and destination for rolling stock of all kinds.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
dstarrNobody has mentioned paper mills
I remember reading articles in model magazines about them. And about paper transport in various cars. I think there have been discussions here, too.
A problem with most mills making roll paper is that the calendering process requires a long process line. That footprint is likely the antithesis of most small industries that will fit on a layout. On the other hand, if you need something as a backdrop across a wall, that might be it.
And there's paper for newsprint, and then there's kraft paper, like the big mill built in Springhill, Louisiana. Lots of sulfur, settling ponds, lots of visual interest.
dstarrNobody has mentioned paper mills.
Yea, right! Not that long ago, WI. was full of them, paper, paper products, along with the raw materials and the other industries that supported the mills, such as clay and clay slurry, was a major portion the WC's traffic.
Mike.
My You Tube
Nobody has mentioned paper mills. Granted most of 'em have moved off shore by now, but back a few years, 20 say, we had a grunch of 'em in New England. Solid brick buildings, a power plant with a tall stack, access to water. Took in pulpwood on flats, coal, chlorine, sizing in covered hoppers. Shipped out paper in big rolls by box car. Great reason to run solid trains of pulpwood even if you lacked a logging camp to supply it.
The entire "animal" industry and its offshoots offers many possibilities for sidings and industries and work for the local. Here in Milwaukee it involved shipments between on-line industries of shorter distances -- more like one sees on a layout - than is common in railroading.
The animal is shipped. It is slaughtered, usually at a place like a packing house, but animal (dog) food places also got their share.
The meat might be shipped. Not all meat is for human consumption.
The organs might be cleaned - at one time "gut" was used for tennis racket strings and musical instrument strings, and other durable rope.
The hides -- to tanneries, which get other things shipped such as chemicals or bark and themselves are shippers of finished leather but also byproducts such as fleshings and hair.
The fleshings -- bits of hide with bits of flesh or muscle -- shipped to fertilizer plants or glue factories. Also chicken feed.
The offal is shipped often in open gons. I saw and smelled this at a siding that served a glue factory, and a factory that made not just fertilizers but chicken feed. In high heat the mass would ooze and burble and sometimes a sort of volcanic eruption would send the stuff over the sides of the gon. Result: the ties and rails were slick with fats sometimes to the point where the ground beneath the ties was destabilized. The whole area stunk.
Presumably some "good" offal is separated and shipped for dog food.
Bones and hooves are shipped - glue and fertilizer and "bone meal."
The blood is saved and shipped, often to be dried and sold as fertilizer or repellent of rabbits and chipmunks in gardens.
The hair scraped from the hides either at slaughterhouse or tannery is saved, packaged and sold. Makes felt.
The tallows and fats are sold, some edible some not. Shipped by tank car as a rule. But tallow is also canned and sold by some slaughter houses, such as Patrick Cudahy.
The manure squeezed from organs also has a market.
At at one point all of this moved by rail, but even into the 1960s alot of it moved by rail, and often tanneries, slaughter houses, and glue factories and fertilizer and dog food factories were all located within a few miles of each other, yet still shipped between them by rail.
The Schlitz Brewing Company here in Milwaukee shipped its spent grain to its company owned duck farms in Northern Racine county - by rail. The ducks were sold as food, as was duck blood (duck blood soup is delicious). The duck manure was retained. Schlitz also owned cranberry bogs in northern Wisconsin, fertlized with their own duck manure as well as some grain wastes. The cranberry wastes and fragments were blended with Schlitz's own duck manure to make a super garden fertilizer that was bagged and sold for high prices. And broken brown glass from the Schlitz bottling plant was shipped by rail to a facility that melted glass cullet into new brown bottles. In bright sun the siding looked like it was ballasted with diamonds!.
Dave Nelson
Motley Coors. The Coors brewry in Golden, CO is an industry that I am modeling on my new layout. The place is huge and has its own rail yard, loco shop, coal power plant, and switchers. There is so much traffic on it, you could make an entire layout on it and be busy swiching cars out. The list of rolling stock includes tank cars, covered hoppers, coal hoppers, flat cars, and refer and non insulated box cars.
Coors. The Coors brewry in Golden, CO is an industry that I am modeling on my new layout. The place is huge and has its own rail yard, loco shop, coal power plant, and switchers. There is so much traffic on it, you could make an entire layout on it and be busy swiching cars out. The list of rolling stock includes tank cars, covered hoppers, coal hoppers, flat cars, and refer and non insulated box cars.
I wouldn't call Coors and beer industry under appreciated. I've always wanted to have beer box cars in my trains (Eel River and ExactRail). Recently RGDave of Onondaga Cutoff Conrail RR posted a series on his beer industry. If I was modeling Denver and the Moffat line, I'd be interested in added Coors but I'm doing the western area. There also have been articles about the beer line as well.
SeeYou190 I rarely recall seeing feritlizer plants, canning plants, or the countless other industries revolving around agriculture. Kevin
I rarely recall seeing feritlizer plants, canning plants, or the countless other industries revolving around agriculture.
Kevin
Canning plants aren't really underappreciated and there are certainly a lot of box cars used to haul canned goods. We have the Spring Mill Depot Canstock box cars to haul can stock to the plants. Moloco and Athearn Genesis etc. sell box cars that were specifically used to haul canned goods. It's not hard to model an industry to park those box cars for loading. I plan to have something like that on my layout.
Walthers sells a LOT of agriculture related buildings as well, check it out.
Rio Grande. The Action Road - Focus 1977-1983
It occurs to me that there are a great many 'inks' that do not involve the high viscosity of 'printer's ink' and would be perfectly suitable for transportation in tank cars if there is sufficient demand -- I am not sure of the viscosity range at which pumping or 'product retention' becomes troublesome. See for example this page, reachable from the reference in the quoted thread, which provides an indication both of the characteristics of one product and the various specialty chemicals that might be involved in its production.
So the 'specialty production' would involve finding either a suitable use for ink of proper characteristics and volume of consumption that would justify 'dedicated cars out' or a choice of 'carloads in' that translate across the range of production of specialty inks in suitable aggregate volume. I would note that it seems likely that some ingredients (e.g. carbon black) are known materials transported in dedicated covered hoppers rather than 'pre-solvated' in tank cars, so there is a different kind of car that would go to a different kind of unloading equipment...
What about a large PPG glass plant lots of covered hoppers in and 18 wheelers out.
Anyone do biodiesel/ethanol plants, or the industries that do 'boutique' fuel or chemical additives? See the T2 MCMT plant in Jacksonville for example (not that this particular reaction would scale up to volume suitable for rail transport!)
Tempting to simulate thermal runaway when deciding to rebuild your layout. And modeling some of the collateral damage for modeling contests...
My favorite industry was the Holly Sugar plant, which I based upon the plant thet was in Manteca, California. I remember SP bringing 100-125 car wood side gondolas with extended sides into the plant loaded with sugar beets. Box cars of bags and cardboard boxes also were inbound to the plant. Outbound traffic was box cars of bagged sugar, covered hoppers of bulk sugar and tank cars of liquid sugar and molasses. Beet pulp was shipped out in covered hoppers to be used in animal feed.
SeeYou190Was newspaper ink ever shipped in Tank Cars?
I think it was a couple of years ago, a thread was started on small industries that use rail service, and quite a few examples came up in the conversation.
One of the industries, not much bigger than the tank cars it received, did something with ink, in tank cars.
It blended them, or mixed them, or ? did something with ink.
Larry (Brakie) was a participent in the thread, as he is into ISL's.
Found it, here's the thread, it was about printers ink, and Central Ink was the name of the industry, and the building looked like a Pike Stuff building.
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/13/t/262501.aspx?page=1#top
I model modern and one industry / structure I built is a Tropicana Jucie facility.
Athearn, BLMA, Bachmann and Intermountain over the years (and decadess) have produced Tropicana reefers in various colors and configurations (I have just about every car that was produced by them).
The train runs from FL to NJ 2-3 times a week, at least once to the Cincinnati area and once to the west coast each week. I looked at all the Walthers, DPM, and other kits out there to see what I can do. I wound up buying a lot of the old Great West Models kits and parts to make a huge facility, all serviced by Tropicana reefers.
When non-model railroaders come and see the layout, many say 'Oh! I've seen that building off the NJ Turnpike!'. I just smile and never let on that it's my design and not the prototype. But then again, if they're happy, I'm happy!
Neal
Great post, which expands the earlier one here: http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/t/81637.aspx
There are a ton of industries that do (did) get rail service.
Trash! On my former layout I had modified a 2 stall engine house so trash trucks used in city service could unload and the waste would be loaded into gondolas for transport out.
These days there are dedicated cars for this but my layout was a bit older so I used gondolas. Not sure if that was ever done in real lif.
Joe Staten Island West
OvermodNewspaper ink is very thick and viscous, incredibly messy, and relatively expensive per pint
Not all that long ago a semi truck was involved in an accident and dumped 5,000 gallons of printer ink on Interstate 285 in Atlanta.
Supposedly, according to local legend, it was the most expensive highway accident in American history.
Attuvian...I wonder what percentage of us are familiar with the term "offal" - at least enough to imagine what gondola loads of it looked like. Just how do you model the loads - and do they come with scale aroma? What a notion for a hot summer day in Ontario!....
I recall reading an article in Trains magazine, where someone talked of handling those cars in the summer, and how some not-too-careful operation by the train's engineer would cause the loads to slosh over the sides and ends of the car. While most of the loads I make for my open cars (gondolas, and hoppers) are "live" - loose material, such as coal, coke, gravel, scrap, and some steel products, I'm pretty sure that "live" loads of offal would also require the aroma and the swarms of flies, the latter being very time-consuming to build. I have, however, been saving parts cut from LPBs - feet, legs, parts of bums, tops of heads - in order to make them fit into vehicles, and thought about using those parts, but it would require a lot of such surgery to fill two or three gondolas. Perhaps some tinted casting resin, with some coloured bits of styrene added would do, but to be honest, I'm not really sure how such a load would look.
Attuvian ...And as for GERN Industries, I understand that they are rather an item of some fancy on the forum. Just what does this plant produce? "Inquiring minds want the know".
The list of GERN products is endless, but here are a few examples:(click on the images for a larger view)
If this piques your interest, send me a PM with your e-mail address, and I'll send you all of the GERN advertising currently available (about eight e-mails-worth of attachments), and whenever my brother creates new GERN stuff, I'll send it along, too.
Wayne
doctorwayne . . . I'll likely model just the gondola loads of offal, coming from one staging area and destined to another. . . . . . . However, the biggest traffic generator on my layout is GERN Industries, with tank cars bringing raw materials in and taking finished product out, . . . Wayne
. . . I'll likely model just the gondola loads of offal, coming from one staging area and destined to another. . . .
. . . However, the biggest traffic generator on my layout is GERN Industries, with tank cars bringing raw materials in and taking finished product out, . . .
Motley Coors. The Coors brewry in Golden, CO is an industry that I am modeling on my new layout. The place is huge
Coors. The Coors brewry in Golden, CO is an industry that I am modeling on my new layout. The place is huge
I'm a customer and a huge fan.
Keep the patronage posted on your modeling project. Does sound interesting to me.
TF
Newspaper ink is very thick and viscous, incredibly messy, and relatively expensive per pint. I have never seen it shipped to clients by rail in anything but relatively small containers, in boxcars or containers, probably on pallets for moving and storage.
I won't say 'never' but it would be really, really unlikely.